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I wonder how the media reaction to this will be, compared to what happened in 2014. I was a much more avid user of Twitter back then, as well as a much bigger gamer compared to now, and I was able to watch in real-time as various gaming media outlets formed their narrative about misogynist gamers harassing women which was about as close to the exact opposite of the situation as one could get if one actually intentionally tried (which I suspect was the case). Even back then, media outlets had been losing readers in favor of social media, but they still seemed to have enough credibility that plenty of more casual gamers just naively took them at their word. 10 years later, and social media has continued to rise and media outlets have continued to lose credibility, and I believe the viewership/readership numbers have reflected this.
That means that if people sympathetic to SBI want to set the narrative again, then doing the same thing as before, where some sympathetic writers at a handful of media outlets rewrite the narrative (most likely in uncoordinated fashion, I'd guess) to flatter the people they like and denigrate the people they don't, might not be enough to achieve the same level of success in convincing people. I primarily learned about this situation from a YouTuber/Twitch streamer who regularly gets 6-7 figures in views on each video, where he was just straight-up shitting on SBI for being ideologues trying to sell something that customers don't want to buy and calling out one of the media outlet authors as racist for stating the very standard - downright cliche at this point - modern "progressive" line "you can't be racist against white people." And there are plenty of smaller "content creators" similar to him saying similar things who still get 5-6 figures per video. That kind of ecosystem wasn't really around back in 2014.
Now, this ecosystem also definitely produces people who are sympathetic to SBI. And, who knows, maybe there are YouTubers who get 7-8 figures per video who basically parrot the lines Kotaku and Polygon spit out? But even if that's the case, I think the presence of the ecosystem of more diverse viewpoints would make it harder for the SBI-preferred narrative of "oppressed minorities being harassed by bigoted gamers who want to exclude them from their spaces" to take hold. It's not a true marketplace of ideas, but it seems at least half a step closer to one than what it was in 2014, and that half a step could be enough for contrasting ideas from diverse viewpoints to win out.
To take a more bird's eye view of this, I think the past decade since the affair of reproductively viable female worker ants has shown that the Anita Sarkeesians of the world had a complete victory in that time period. SBI has been around and modifying games for a while, and it's only now, after plenty of damage has been done to multiple formerly well-regarded franchises, that fans have even begun to notice them to any significant extent, much less push back. And more to the point, the very fact that devs and/or publishers see enough value in SBI that SBI can survive as a company shows that the ideology has taken a pretty firm root in the industry. The future is not yet set, of course, and this particular episode seems to be at least a blip in the other direction, but what I'd expect right now is that the people sympathetic to SBI will come up with some new technique that I don't even have the capability to imagine right now to continue to subvert the industry in ways that paying customers are even less able to notice or control.
Grapevine says it is due to ESG investment monies, by involving SBI they get access to more funding from institutions that demand woke capitulation.
To add onto 07's reply (and WestphalianPeace's, kind of), this feels a little hard to believe when SBI is potentially the Kiss of Death for developer studios. We are currently in an era of layoffs across literally any industry connected to technology (including journalism and especially including game development above the indie or mid-market level), and Suicide Squad will be the end of Rocksteady if it isn't already.
Sure, the publishers wiping their tears with stacks of cash while the developers are left to look for new jobs is not a new story by any means, but I suppose it casts some doubt on this narrative.
This is a very reasonable critique.
I should be clear that the Cadastral Map Bias lens is my strong prior of first resort for inexplicable behavior by companies. I am not well read enough on SBI to back up the truth of the grapevine claim.
What on earth is going on with the layoffs btw? Did the industry over hire? It seems really inexplicable from afar.
The simple story is afaik that covid was very good for gaming so they hired a lot and now it has normalized again, so they have to lay people off again. This is compounded by loans/financing being much less available currently than expected. Whether it was a mistake or just calculation is hard to tell, though I lean towards something like they knew it'll probably normalize again at some point but didn't know when so it would have been irrational to not hire more people for the time being when there's money to be made now. And as usual, there's probably a spectrum ranging from savvy experts hiring deliberately in a way that firing them later down to road wouldn't hurt the core business on one end and naive idiots hearing that everyone else is hiring a lot and business is booming so they just buy studios and hire like crazy on the other.
This is likely true. I'd like to add, as someone who has been playing online games since the text-based ones of the 90s over dial up, there are far too many of them. This leads to situations where say a mix of 20 mid to good online games ultimately fail for lack of a large enough player base, where if the bottom 1/2 of those games never existed in the first place the other 10 would probably have been fine. Everyone wants to be the next GTA 5/Online though, raking in billions for comparatively low continuing* effort by the publisher and the studio.
*not the original effort to make the game, which was a large project, but the "keeping the lights on" mode where most of the earnings actually occurred. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-grand-theft-auto-revenue-and-costs/
I don't even think it's "too many online games" that's the problem, it's more "too many online games that rely on matchmaking queues or any other server infrastructure the devs have to maintain themselves." If an online game that can run off of end-user-maintained dedicated servers comes out and bombs, it's sad, but it won't also be lost to the sands of time.
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I've seen people claim this a lot, but as best as I can tell, this is a naked claim without any actual evidence. Are there any documents anywhere showing what scores different companies have, how putting in uglier women or more pathetic men into their products changes the scores, or how much investments into these companies get affected by that score? And is investment from institutions that demand woke capitulation that big of a factor in financial success in the gaming industry when compared to simply putting out a good product?
In any case, assuming every single claim about ESG scores being the driver of this phenomenon is true, that would explain how the ideology has taken a pretty firm root in the industry.
If you are interested, here is the following from James Lindsey @conceptualjames on X:
https://x.com/conceptualjames/status/1767208090150060079
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It's not ugly women and pathetic men that makes the score go up, it's just interacting with SBI, and corporate decision-makers see no reason NOT to chase ESG, since to them "quality" is a vague untrackable nonsense term uncorrelated with the financial success of a product, but ESG rating IS trackable and legible
At the level of abstraction that a Blackrock index fund is looking at, even hiring SBI doesn't move the needle. ESG schmas are not sector-specific (they probably should be) so the "Social" component of an ESG score needs to include things like "does not use slave labour in Africa" and the wokeness points are for generic things like "has women on the board" and "has a small gender pay gap".
Within the universe of companies my GSIB employer does business with, every non-evil company gets near-perfect SG scores, and the variation in ESG scores is driven by environmental issue (by construction of the scores, mostly carbon).
Do we actually have numbers on that, that we can look at, instead of people just saying how they think this works?
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"Seeing like a State" continues to stay relevant.
Interesting stories, fandom goodwill, and developer reputation continue to be the illegible benefits of the varied forest biome. All sacrificed for a cadastral map of Norway Spruce accessible to investors who can only work by algorithm.
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